Friday Music News

“We bloody won the Mercury!!!” Alt-J announced on Facebook yesterday. The band’s debut album, An Awesome Wave, had won the Barclaycard Mercury Prize, an award for the best UK album of the year. And they’re in good company, too: over the past twenty years, the prize has gone to classic albums like Portishead’s Dummy and Pulp’s Different Class. Watch Alt-J’s live KEXP performance here, and check out their video for “Tessellate” below.

David Byrne and St. Vincent appeared on The Colbert Report last night to perform tracks from their new album Love This Giant. The duo chatted briefly with Colbert about living in Downtown Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy (both are still without water and electricity) and came to terms with their status as extraordinary people (“I make a great effort to be ordinary,” David confessed). The full interview and an exclusive performance of “Weekend in the Dust” are both available at colbertnation.com; watch them perform “Who” below and check out our review of their Seattle show here.

Shabazz Palaces recently added some new dates to their world tour schedule. The group will tour Europe with labelmates THEESatisfaction this fall, return to their native Seattle to play a show at the Neptune on December 28, and take off on a U.S. tour with Heliosequence in January. A full list of tour dates is available at their website.

Finally, in a move that surprised virtually no one, Epic Records is “working to dissolve [its] relationship with Death Grips,” Pitchfork reports. For those of you who haven’t been following the NO LOVE DEEP WEB controversy, here’s a quick recap: Death Grips released the new album on the internet on October 1 after their label allegedly pushed the album’s release to next year. “The label will be hearing the album for the first time with you,” they tweeted, via their now-defunct Twitter account. Death Grips claim Epic shut down their website just after they had released the album; on Wednesday, the group took to Facebook to post what appears to be a confidential letter from Epic’s legal department, requesting that Death Grips stop distributing the album and turn over the master tapes to Epic. The band’s response? “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA NOW FUCK OFF.”